Fire and Rain (33 page)

During the first half of the summer, McCartney was at war with the other Beatles on two different, equally frustrating fronts. First were the pop charts. On June 6,
McCartney
overtook
Déjà vu
to become the best-selling album in America;
Let It Be
was stuck at number 2. But what satisfaction McCartney took from those numbers didn't last. The following week,
Let It Be
leapt over
McCartney
to commandeer the number 1 spot, where it remained for four straight weeks.

As a movie,
Let It Be
was a muddle, and its accompanying album, especially coming after the vacuum-packed cohesion of
Abbey Road
, was a bit of a mess. It promised spontaneity but delivered it only half the time, in the relatively raw performance of “I Got a Feeling” and off-the-cuff bits of folk songs like “Maggie Mae.” In contrast, the violins and horns Spector had added not only to “The Long and Winding Road” but “I Me Mine” truly did sound as if they'd been inserted at a later date. The applause at the conclusion of “Get Back,” along with Lennon's instantly famous quip (“I hope we've passed the audition”), were grafted onto a studio version of the song. Starting with a cover that featured separate shots of each Beatle, the album felt stitched together with very apparent thread.

Yet for all its blemishes,
Let It Be
was still remarkable. It was impossible
to dismiss an album that featured McCartney's “Let It Be” and “Get Back,” Lennon's “Across the Universe,” and Harrison's English-manor country blues, “For You Blue.” In the movie, “Two of Us” was seen and heard in a coarse electric version dominated by one of McCartney's more camera-hogging performances. The album version, framed around acoustic guitars and a gentler give-and-take between Lennon and McCartney, was a lovely, touching eulogy. Performances like that were the album's secret weapon. Far more than anything they'd done since the pre-
Sgt. Pepper
days,
Let It Be
captured the sound of the Beatles playing and interacting together as a
band
. And in another swipe McCartney couldn't have appreciated, Spector's choir on “The Long and Winding Road” actually enhanced the emotions in the song in a way that the stripped-down version hadn't.

McCartney
boasted two first-rate, fully realized songs: “Maybe I'm Amazed,” an expression of love and devotion that showcased both McCartney's most earnest singing and his prowess as a lead guitarist, and “Every Night,” an adult lullaby that again demonstrated McCartney's innate musicality. But arriving in tandem with his jarring news to the world, the album's whimsy and offhandedness felt off-putting, even perverse. With its goofy half-songs, instrumentals, and handmade feel, the album was so slight it made “Maxwell's Silver Hammer,” the
Abbey Road
trifle so detested by Lennon, seem like heavy metal. The record's very lightheartedness felt like an affront to Beatle fans everywhere: He “left” the Beatles to bang around on drums, sing along with Linda, and try to convince fans that the trivial, cloying “Junk” should have been included on the White Album?

The second combat front opened up after both albums were battling it out in stores. Two months earlier, McCartney had done the rest of the band a favor by articulating what no one else wanted to make public: The Beatles were no longer the Beatles. Yet the way in which he'd let the world in on it left a bad taste in the mouths of Harrison, Lennon, Starr,
and their friends and partners. “They never expected it to be in the paper,” Chris O'Dell recalled. “Things were not good, but did Paul say, ‘I did an interview in the paper tomorrow?' No. They were pissed off. It changed the complexion of things a lot.”

The aftershock continued in the interactions between their now separate and warring business teams. In June, John Eastman, part of McCartney's legal team, sent a letter to Allen Klein informing Klein he'd contacted a tax advisor “for an opinion on the suggested dissolution of the partnership. It would be helpful if you too could secure an opinion.” Revealing how personal things were becoming, Eastman added, with veiled sarcasm, “I suggest that you put your fertile mind to work on all the aspects.”

Klein despised Eastman—a trim, officious, upper-crust type—as much as Eastman disliked him. Among other things, Klein hadn't been pleased when Eastman reportedly ordered strips of black tape placed over Klein's address on the back cover of every press review copy of
McCartney
. (Eastman would neither confirm nor deny the reports.) Klein didn't respond to Eastman's June letter, but he made his feelings known in other ways. Shortly after noon on July 29, Apple's Peter Brown phoned Klein, saying, as he recalled in a later court affidavit, that McCartney “should have some regular monthly payment from the Beatles in order to meet the expenses which he would now be paying himself rather than through Beatles and Co.” (Beatles and Co. was now the official name of their business organization.) The requested amount was 1,500 pounds a month. Since EMI royalties would have to go through ABKCO before they were distributed to Apple and then the Beatles, Klein denied McCartney's request.

Even within McCartney's own company, money matters were muddy. In 1968, he'd produced one of Apple's few non-Beatle hits, Welsh singer Mary Hopkin's modern-vaudeville pop song “Those Were the Days.” The single had been massive, selling millions of copies around the world.
But now Apple wanted $135,575—McCartney's fee as a producer—deducted from the funds it owed the Beatles “for individual record royalties.” The other Beatles were now being financially punished for one of McCartney's outside assignments.

As Charles Manson stared at him, an “X” mark freshly carved into his forehead with a razor blade (the infamous swastika came later), Vincent Bugliosi prepared to tell the world why Manson had convinced some of his followers to kill. Bugliosi knew some in the legal community would think the sad-eyed deputy district attorney of Los Angeles County was crazy. But now, in the Hall of Justice on the morning of July 24, the first day of the State of California
vs
. Charles Manson and six of his followers, Bugliosi knew the time had arrived to tell the world that the Beatles indirectly had something to do with it.

Rumors about the connection between Manson and the Beatles had first circulated in February, when an unnamed source in the District Attorney's office told the
Los Angeles Times
that prosecutors in the case were examining a possible link between the killers and the White Album. The story spread when it was picked up by the
New York Post
the following day. As laid out by the source—not Bugliosi, who denied talking to anyone in the media before the trial had begun—the idea seemed too fantastical to be true. Manson envisioned a coming war between blacks and whites in which only Manson and his followers would survive. The best way to inaugurate the war was to slaughter a bunch of white people in Los Angeles and make it appear as if African Americans had committed the crimes.

The story only grew stranger as it continued. To Manson, the entire tale was laid out in the White Album. He interpreted “Honey Pie” (which beckoned someone to “sail across the ocean”) as the Beatles'
message to him. “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” was a communiqué to blacks telling them to prepare to rise up and fight; “Blackbird” supposedly served the same purpose. The war itself would be called “Helter Skelter,” another song on the record; the battle was laid out in the chaotic noise of “Revolution 9.” In another supposed sign of his bond with the Beatles, Manson claimed he'd renamed Susan Atkins “Sadie” long before the album's “Sexy Sadie.” On it went—all of it, according to Bugliosi's theory, culminating in the grisly murders the previous August of eight-months-pregnant actress Sharon Tate, coffee heiress Abigail Folger, hairdresser Jay Sebring, writer Wojiciech Frykowski, teenager Steven Parent, and supermarket executive Leno LaBianca and his wife Rosemary.

When the
Times
and
Post
stories emerged, the prevailing feeling was disbelief;
Rolling Stone
ran a skeptical commentary on the reports. But Bugliosi was convinced after two Family members, Brooks Poston and Paul Watkins, told him separately about Manson's consuming obsession with the album.

In the valleys and canyons of Los Angeles, Manson's ties with rock and roll were well known; he'd spooked plenty in the music community. Two years earlier, he and members of the Family had crashed at the home of Beach Boy Dennis Wilson; Wilson went so far as to oversee demos of Manson singing his own songs. One of them, “Cease to Exist” (retitled “Never Learn Not to Love” by Wilson), wound up on a Beach Boys album. Returning to his apartment one day, Danny Kortchmar, James Taylor's lead guitarist, found his place ransacked, guitars and equipment gone. Later, Kortchmar heard the Family may have been responsible; Manson, he heard, dispatched members of his flock to rob musicians' homes so Manson would have the gear necessary to fulfill his fantasy of being a rock star. Manson had also been angry with record producer Terry Melcher, who'd expressed interest in recording an album of Manson's songs until he saw the dark side of the diminutive cult
leader. Melcher had previously lived at the Cielo Drive house where the Tate murders were committed.

Near Neil Young's home in Topanga Canyon, everyone knew about Manson. While staying in the house of David Briggs, Young's friend and producer, Nils Lofgren heard the stories about Manson's crew and saw the weapons Briggs and his friends were storing in case they came by. One day, Lofgren and Bobby Morse, one of Briggs' roommates, went to Briggs' home to pick up something for a session. “Oh, no, it's that crazy bitch,” Morse said, gesturing at a girl in front of the house, standing beside a car with a flat tire. The girl asked to see another of their roommates. “He's not here,” Morse said curtly. “You gotta get out of here.” They quickly replaced her tire, but when the girl insisted on staying, Morse told her she couldn't. “They're bad people,” Morse told Lofgren after she left, “and we don't want 'em here.” Months later, when Manson and Family members were arrested on charges of murder, Lofgren recognized the girl as one of the accomplices.

The chilly repercussions extended to the U.K. Just before the murders, Dan Richter was living at the home Lennon had owned before Tittenhurst. Afraid the Lennons were next in line and that the killers might discover where he lived, the Richters moved, at Lennon and Ono's invitation, to Tittenhurst.

In his opening statement in court, Bugliosi hardly minced words when relaying his theory. “The evidence will show Manson's fanatical obsession with ‘Helter Skelter,' a term he got from the English musical group the Beatles,” he told the jury. “Manson was an avid follower of the Beatles and believed that they were speaking to him across the ocean through the lyrics of their songs.” To bolster his case, Bugliosi entered the White Album as evidence, along with a door from Spahn Ranch (where the Family had been living) on which “Helter Skelter” had been scrawled. The lyrics to the songs were read into evidence.

To Bugliosi's surprise, no public outcry greeted his theory. Leaving the
courtroom that day, no reporters besieged him to ask for further details. He didn't know whether to be shocked or not. Bugliosi himself never heard from any of the Beatles or their representatives. Even if the public, press, or his fellow lawyers thought he was insane, the jury made it clear it took his theory seriously. During the trial, they requested a stereo for the deliberation room along with their own copy of the Beatles' two-LP set.

For a moment, the Beatles themselves were almost pulled into the case when Manson's defense team sent a writ to Lennon to testify. “We feel he may want to explain the lyrics,” a member of the team told the Associated Press. Reached for comment by the press, Apple spokesman Derek Taylor was pithy as always. Requesting Lennon's presence at the trial, he said, was “like summoning Shakespeare to explain
Macbeth
.” Besides, he added, it was McCartney, not his former band partner, who wrote “Helter Skelter.” The plan ran aground when Manson's lawyers couldn't find a way to physically administer summonses to each Beatle. Apparently, none of them knew that, during the jury-selection process that began in mid June, Lennon was in their very city, undergoing primal scream therapy.

Five months later,
Rolling Stone
's Wenner asked Lennon about the trial and Manson's interpretations of some of his songs. “He's balmy, he's like any other Beatle kind of fan who reads mysticism into it,” he said of Manson. “ . . . I don't know, what's ‘Helter Skelter' got to do with knifing somebody? I've never listened to the words properly, it was just noise.” The trial and the association was just another death knell for his former band.